Integrating the Developers' and the Management's Perspective of an Incremental Development Life Cycle

Purely sequential life cycles can't cope with the developer's need for relatively unrestricted and \unordered" creativity when dealing with the development of innovative software systems. Nevertheless, project management usually favors sequential project phasing, because sequential processes are easier to plan, control and monitor. In this paper, we present a life cycle plan that integrates an incremental and iterative development style, relying on evolutionary prototyping, with the management's perspective of clear and unambiguous project phasing. As consequence of applying this \hybrid" life cycle plan, the quality of innovative, complex software systems can be increased, while risks can be detected better and earlier. We support validity of our approach by also reporting experiences we made when applying the life cycle plan to two large, multilateral software projects, and compare them to two systems developed following the traditional approach. Biographical: Andreas Zamperoni received a master degree in computer science from the Technical Uni-Netherlands), where he investigates, evaluates, and enhances software development of geoscientiic software systems. His research topics include object-oriented software engineering methodologies, software process modeling, and system architectures. He has also published in the eld of quality enhancement for conceptual speciications. Bart Gerritsen received a master degree in mechanical engineering specializing in CAD from the Delft Technical University in 1986. He has been a senior system developer and project leader at Cap Gemini. Since 1991, he is project leader and software quality assurance oocer at TNO Institute of Applied Geoscience (Delft, The Netherlands). He has been a project leader of the TNO participation at a 20+ man year international project funded by the EC. Currently, he is leading a project for the innovation of the entire information infrastructure of an oil company in South America. He is also working on a PhD on Subsurface Modeling Methodologies.